by Calculated Risk on 2/23/2010 02:42:00 PM

Finally. The S&P website has been down all morning.

S&P/Case-Shiller released the monthly Home Price Indices for December (actually a 3 month average).

The monthly data includes prices for 20 individual cities, and two composite indices (10 cities and 20 cities). This is the Seasonally Adjusted monthly data - some sites report the NSA data.

Click on graph for larger image in new window.

The first graph shows the nominal seasonally adjusted Composite 10 and Composite 20 indices (the Composite 20 was started in January 2000).

The Composite 10 index is off 30.3% from the peak, and up about 0.3% in December.

The Composite 20 index is off 29.4% from the peak, and up 0.3% in December.

The impact of the massive government effort to support house prices is obvious on the Composite graph. The question is what happens to prices as these programs end over the next few months?

The second graph shows the Year over year change in both indices.

The Composite 10 is off 2.4% from December 2008.

The Composite 20 is off 3.1% from December 2008.

The third graph shows the price declines from the peak for each city included in S&P/Case-Shiller indices.

Prices decreased (SA) in 6 of the 20 Case-Shiller cities in December.

In Las Vegas, house prices have declined 55.9% from the peak. At the other end of the spectrum, prices in Dallas are only off about 3.1% from the peak. Several cities are showing price increases in 2009 - San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C., Denver and Dallas.